If you haven’t caught Chonkers’ viral moment, you’re missing out. He’s a real “sea-lebrity.”
Sea lions are common along San Francisco’s Pier 39. But Chonkers is not common. He is a Steller sea lion, a different species than the smaller sea lions typically found along the famous pier in the Fisherman’s Wharf district.
Chonkers is “beefy,” someone said on social media. The analogy was spot on. The sea lion weighs around 2,000 pounds, about the same as a beef bull, and dwarfs the other sea lions sunning on the pier with him.
Chonkers has apparently cruised through the Bay Area for more than a decade. He showed up at the dock sometime in March, most likely due to the abundance of food in the area.
Tourists and those admiring him vicariously on social media are obsessed. A video of him flopping onto the pier and throwing a couple of smaller sea lions into the water looks like something that might happen at a 10-year college reunion where the class “jerk jock” drank too much. But behaviors that are obnoxious among people are adorable among sea lions, and people just can’t get enough of Chonkers.
Chonkers has become so famous that the nonprofit Marine Mammal Center, the largest hospital of its kind in the world, is selling plushie likenesses of the Steller sea lion.
r sea lion to support its work.
Don’t worry, the plushie Chonkers has been scaled down to make it cuddly. It’s not like you’ll have to wrestle something the size of a fully grown farm animal.
The crew of the fishing vessel Timothy Michael recently found something rare and beautiful in their haul off Cape Cod — a lobster whose body was orange-red on one side and brown on the other, the markings divided by a straight line from head to tale.
The crustacean’s two-tone look is the result of a rare genetic variation found in about 1 of 50 million lobsters, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Fisheries Service said.
The lobster won’t be served with clarified butter and lemon. She was spared a pot of boiling water by the Wellfleet Shellfish Co., which acquired the lobster.
“Instead of heading to market, she’s heading somewhere even more special,” the company wrote on social media.
That place is Massachusetts’ Woods Hole Science Aquarium, where she’ll eventually live and be on exhibit.
Statistically, this sounds made up. A weird Powerball quirk that suddenly minted 18 new millionaires across New Jersey.
The bizarre lucky streak happened during the April 29 Powerball drawing, when players across New Jersey apparently gravitated toward the same vertical column on their lottery play slips — and somehow struck gold. Lottery officials say the unusual pattern likely explains why 18 tickets in New Jersey alone matched all five white balls, with four tickets worth $2 million each, and 14 worth $1 million.
The $143.4 million jackpot will be split between two ticket holders in Kanas and Indiana.
Although New Jersey had more overnight millionaires than any other state, 91 players nationwide won $1 million or more, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association.
The unusually high number of winners appears to have resulted from many players selecting their numbers from a single vertical column on their play slips, a pattern that exists across multiple state lottery play slips, officials said.
A 17th-century reliquary urn stolen from an Italian church has been recovered by the FBI’s Boston Division.
The urn, carved and gilded in wood, was among 17 ecclesiastical artifacts stolen from the Church of San Michele Arcangelo di Cangiano in Foggia between August 2012 and August 2022.
The FBI said it took possession of the “opulent” urn in February at the request of the Italian Ministry of Culture. An antiques dealer in the Northeast had purchased it from another dealer in Italy and voluntarily turned over the historic artifact “so it can be returned to its rightful home,” the agency said.
The mysterious benefactors who buried a treasure worth $10,000 in San Francisco last year are back at it again this year with a similar prize and a perplexing set of clues that, as of Friday, had stymied hunters.
This year’s prize weighs over 150 pounds and comes out to $10,001 in cash, according to the organizers, who launched the hunt on April 29 on a San Francisco Subreddit thread. The clues are more befuddling than last year, when the treasure was found in just 11 hours. It’s buried under about a foot of earth, about 7 miles from San Francisco City Hall, and is not underwater. Someone “got shockingly close,” the organizers said.
Treasure hunters probably won’t get a third shot at a prize.
“It was a questionable financial decision the first time and downright idiotic the second,” the organizers posted on their website, adding that, barring the addition of a wealthy collaborator, “There truly can’t be a third.”
A school resource officer in Illinois was placed on administrative leave after he lost or misplaced his gun in the school restroom on May 1.
The officer, who was assigned to Forest View Educational Center in Arlington Heights, removed his gun from his holster while he was using the restroom, but didn’t realize it was missing until classes were dismissed for the day.
Classes were canceled on May 2, but resumed the following day after authorities said they were confident the gun was no longer in the school. Hallway surveillance cameras revealed a limited number of people entered the restroom.
Two people have been arrested in connection with the theft, according to Arlington Heights police. The gun still had not been recovered on Friday.
Velella velella created a spectacular sight when thousands, if not millions, of them were recently beached along the coastline from Southern California to San Francisco.
They look like small, bright blue, oval gelatinous blobs with a clear, rigid flap that sits diagonally across the top, acting like a sail to catch the wind. They glide effortlessly along the surface of the ocean and, accordingly, are often called “by-the-wind sailors.” Wind directions will at times send the creatures toward the coastline, stranding them.
They’re not jellyfish, although they’re often confused, and swimmers unfortunate enough to encounter velella say their sting is as irritating as their doppelgängers’.
“They can sting more when they are floating in the water and less so when they've been thrashed in the surf before beaching onto the coarse sand,” Roundhouse Aquarium's Program and Operations Director Marissa Wu previously told Patch. “Then the Velella velella tend to be worn out and quite harmless by the time folks discover them among the beach wrack.”
Acrobatic Worms Are Now Widespread
Asian jumping worms, an invasive, soil nutrient-gobbling earthworm that can leap a foot in the air, are moving rapidly across the country, with sightings in 38 states, according to new tracking.
Their scientific name is Amynthas agrestis. They are known as jumping worms — as well as Alabama jumpers, Jersey wrigglers, wood eel, crazy worms, snake worms, and crazy snake worms — because of the way they thrash around. They can flip themselves a foot off the ground.
All that jumping expends a lot of energy, which the worms fuel by eating everything in their path. Other earthworms are beneficial and aerate the soil and help prep it for growth. But once jumping worms have had their way in your dirt, it will have the consistency of coffee grounds and won’t be useful for growing anything but frustration. Jumping worms also elbow other species out of the way
Jumping worm populations grow quickly through a couple of generations a season. Like other worms, they’re hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female reproductive organs, but with a distinction: Jumping worms reproduce on their own.
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